War

04/21/2014

John Schindler, the former NSA official and professor at the US Navy Academy, has a theory of "special wars" -- basically running wars like the Russians do in order to be able to fight them.

Except, I'm quite sure neither he nor any supporters would like that reductive description of the concept.

I love John Schindler's stuff -- don't get me wrong. I always marvel that someone that young who didn't directly fight the Soviets in the dissident trenches understands so much about them and their methods, and is even able to teach others about it methodically. It restores my hope in the NSA after Snowden, which for me, like CableGate, is at least in part about the failure of government to keep out the adversarial hacker culture that accompanies wikification and moving life online.

Schindler has been absolutely right on Snowden and all things related to it, so I take seriously any theory he comes up with about how to fight the Russians better, especially now that they have really gone full-tilt into enemy mode. I'm all for containment, Cold War, deterrence -- the works because all of that is required with this kind of real threat to the West.

So how hard will it be to put "special war" over politically, given the Obama "progressives" and what is to come if they succeed again in 2016?

I've been thinking about it since last year, and have questions about it:

Ever since I heard of Schindler’s “special war” theory last September, I’ve pondered whether I like it or not — but then, war isn’t something you “like like” – as you do a Facebook kitty. There’s the Catholic theory of “a just war” which should have as its goals the ending of war. Does it fit?

I wonder how some of its aspects are to be distinguished from what used to be called “CIA dirty tricks” — and maybe it’s not. For those who don’t want to endorse drones and mass killing, “special wars” is an attractive alternative. And indeed, any moral person has to ask why we wouldn’t opt for “special wars” that are more efficient, require much less troops, seem brainier, and are more pin-pointed. That is, a drone might have “collateral damage” or hit women and children or wedding guests while going after the fighters who deliberately mingle among them — there’s lots of angst about drones become of the remoteness of the operation of them. Then massive numbers of troops — as in the “surge” in Afghanistan — that just seems to get lots of our soldiers killed, and not win the war anyway — precisely because we live in the age of “special wars” which the Russians and the Taliban for that matter are really good at.

So wouldn’t we rather have an intelligence agent parachute in and assassinate the Pakistani ISI operative who is sustaining the Taliban, or infiltrate a political party, or get inside the prime minister’s office, or whatever it is that you do, instead of massing troops around borders and trying to drone away militants. In the old days, that’s what the CIA did, and it worked in some places, but it got a bad rap.

That’s my question then. Once “special wars” gets going, how will it deal with the bad rap? The Russians and even some Ukrainians think the US has mercenaries parachuted into southeastern Ukraine already (we don’t); what if we start really doing that sort of thing?

Next, there is so much wrong with the military — scandals in the top leadership, suicides, massacres of civilians, PTSD– as I’ve noted before, I think this is a mismatch between the reality of what war is, and the PR campaign that the armed forces insist on retaining, which implies that you “learn a skill” and “get a job” through the military — meaning that the poor people who come into this setting think their goal is to get a skill and be assured of a job, instead of going into dangerous places and killing people. So that begs the question: can we make “special wars” with *this* army?

In general, I’d like to see less contractors in the armed services and government in general — most problems we’ve had — think of Snowden – are related to them. So would “special wars” be done with contractors? I think it would be better to have permanent, trained, regular armed services doing this.

We also need more HUMINT, foreign languages, education — how will that be assured? Can existing academies like West Point create the cadres of the “special wars” or does some other academy have to be created?

Finally, what about the moral problem of “becoming like them”? The Russians are good at “special wars” because they’re cynical nihilists exploiting illiberal ideas like nationalism or Eurasianism. Can you get good at “special wars” and remain decent?

So basically, it comes down to this: if Schindler means that we should get better at fighting the Russians who use this whole array of Bolshevik methods, from disinformation to masking to lying to agitation and propaganda -- by using more counter-intelligence and counter-propaganda, I'm for that. But how much will we be lying, cheating, disinforming, faking, masking, ourselves then?

Would it involve committing terrorism against civilians?

That is, I'm for exposing propaganda, calling out lies, vigorously challenging all the bullshit coming out of the Kremlin and broadcasting much more of it than we do. I'm for getting a lot more clever about dealing with this ruthless enemy in the Kremlin. Some of that requires clandestine work that the public will have to take on faith needs to be done, and the less they know about it, the better. But how to get that through in the age of Snowden, where the default of most young people is to distrust government and imagine the US is the greatest evil in the world?

12/26/2013

Let me put it in a nutshell -- I'm a supporter of national armies, I'm not a pacifist, even if I have objections to the war in Iraq or aspects of the war in Afghanistan and the drones program on moral grounds. I think we live in a dangerous world with really awful and nasty enemies that we didn't create by warring against them or their proxies, who are really evil all on their own. I'm not so sure the surge was a great idea, and we pretty much lost the war in Afghanistan, which I find awful, as I do know something about this region, and I think it will definitely go downhill into worse security and more instability and poverty for the people of Eurasia and South Asia.

But while we can argue about whether this or that war makes sense, or this or that way of pursuing the war, or whether "special wars" (clandestine and even illegal intelligence operations) have to take the place of massive armies marching in the night and people dying in the mud, there has to be a discussion about what I see is a looming moral problem.

Why is the military so messed up? We've had a military that has *created* and *not saved us from* harm by giving us Manning, Snowden, McCrystal, Petraeus, Bales, and Carey -- to mention just some of the most lurid, most destructive figures who have been through our armed forces and have objectively wound up hurting their own countries tremendously.

Why is that? Why did this happen?

So let me go through my thinking on this:

I know it's Christmas, but I really couldn't take it more -- the lastest "returning soldier surprise" story was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I know for some it's tantamount to treason to question these heart-wretching but usually kitschy stories that appear practically every day, especially in mass media and local newspapers, but I do. I really find them reprehensible. I always have. They've always irritated, then angered me. (They irritate me as much as the sly and manipulative "Support Our Troops" meme which witless Dem operatives purveyed in lieu of a real peace movement -- hey, be against wars if you want, but at least have the decency not to pretend that you are "for" soldiers as if they are like union employees just "doing a job."

Here's why all those stories about soldiers surprising their little kids in their elementary schools with an unexpected early return home, or soldiers appearing suddenly at their mom's birthday party, or soldiers suddenly showing up to propose marriage, or soldiers suddenly appearing at their brother's workplace -- why none of them work for me.

That is, sure, they're nice, and no doubt the people in the stories really appreciate them and are awfully glad to have their loved ones home surprising them like this.

But their institutionalization as a meme, as a staple of culture, as a news diet, as a kind of justification of everything -- that just doesn't work.

And here's why -- first, two big reasons -- and then the rests of the reasons why I find the military just so screwed up these days and think it should change:

1) Because they didn't HAVE to go to these wars. They are in a voluntary army. They were not conscripted. Especially women could CHOOSE to stay home with a NEWBORN BABY, for example, good Lord, no war is worth leaving a nursing baby for when you don't have to! A newly-married husband doesn't have to join the army, either, he can stay home with his new wife. A father of two elementary school kids really does have choices and doesn't need to ensure that they grow up without him and risk turning into little felons or drug abusers.

And so on. They chose to go overseas to fight in a war, then they should accept that this will mean hardship and even possibly deprivation and grief for their families and loved ones. That's why their sudden showings and media-saturated surprises just don't add up. The poignancy part, I mean. The drama. There was no need, because you didn't really have to go.

Why not do the hard job of staying home and taking care of your responsibilities and getting a good education and a good job on your own? Then maybe you'd have something to bring to -- instead of taking from -- the armed services.

2) Because the armed forces have engaged in a massive public relations program for years which amounts to this: join the army, learn a trade, get an education for free, and get a job when you get out. This seems really attractive to a lot of people. But it's hugely misleading. They paint a picture as if you have to go through a bit of a rugged boot camp, sure, but then you are taught all these interesting skills useful in the private sector. Yes, you have to go overseas, but you'll either be on a ship somewhere, or you'll be in Germany, or maybe South Korea, or maybe merely just sitting in Texas. or maybe you'll go to Afghanistan, but not very long, and in any event, even if you do, you don't have a huge chance of being killed. Then college-- paid for -- and that great job! With that great resume-booster provided free by Uncle Sam.

This "learn a skill, get a job" stuff is very deep-seated, and you find all sorts of people drawing on it, mainly in the lower classes,the poor, or the clueless middle class that is turning into lower class due to recessions and lay-offs. You even hear people tell themselves that they have "no choice" but to go "get a job" in the army because there are "no jobs" elsewhere.

I personally find this bullshit, as those who want to work can get jobs -- they just might not be jobs with free education and exotic travel and missions to go with them.

3) It's my firm conviction that the reason we have so many people having psychotic breaks in the armed forces, and going crazy and killing civilians, or coming home and committing suicide, or suffering from PTSD and substance abuse, is because of the massive disconnect between the advertisements, and the shill about "learn a trade, get a job" and the reality which is -- be trained in something that might help our mission of killing people, kill then, then go home and resume your normal life.

We're unable to create a valid and efficient killing machine when necessary, and what we have instead is an army of job trainees who seem shocked and surprise that their internships and apprenticeships have IEDs in them.

I think this goes up the chain, and the sense of "you are special, we trained you, and now you're fabulous" sets up a situation where you feel you can have affairs, get drunk, be abusive, not do your duty, all because it's about you, and not anything else.

I really think the army has to step back from how they do this recruitment, how they set up expectations, and change the message and the perception managements. And I'm confident if they do, they will get better people and better outcomes. But this will require a wrenching re-evaluation and changes of policy.

They tried "the few, the proud, the Marines" to emphasize how they really needed good, intelligent, skillful, rare people, and not dumbasses who take drugs and can't hold a job - but then they forgot that there's still the other three branches of armed service to fill -- and they needed more than just a "few". Somehow, the pumping up of egos involved in getting "the few, the proud" led us not to Navy SEALS killing bin Ladn, or whatever our "gold standard" is for selfless, unsung heroics of good people doing their duty, but has led us to generals who behave outrageously and subject their nation to indelible humiliation and denigration.

I live next door to a National Guard depot and I see the kinds of people there, and my son has various friends who have "deployed," as they describe it. How can I describe this? Well, the very word explains the mindset. These are people who either barely graduated from school, are from poor or immigrant families, who don't have a lot of prospects, who for various reasons of background needed the security of having everything organized for them. They don't say, "I'm going into the army to serve my country, it's my duty." They don't say "We have a mission to fulfill, these terrorists need to be shown who's boss" or "if we don't stop the creeping menace of Islamism, our own freedoms will be in jeopardy," they say "I'm in training"and "I'm being deployed" in the same tone of voice as people describe being sent for training and then a job in another state if they decide to work or IBM or Accenture.

They've absorbed the recruitment message and they embody it -- and it's a problematic message because we all know that they won't get a job with this "training" after they return and we're lucky if they even manage to fight the war they're plopped into. Instead of getting jobs and going on with their lives, they have an excellent chance of coming back with substance abuse problems, PTSD, and emotional problems that if anything, prevent them from ever becoming productive members of society.

4) I'm not a pacifist, and I don't have a problem with people deciding to serve in the army for whatever reason; indeed, our national security depends on it. Neither of my grandfathers served in World War II, I have no idea why, but apparently their ages were such that they were a bit too old and had large families to support and worked in factories. My father served in the Korean War. His father had died in an accident and he had his mother and disabled sister to support. They rented out the top floor of their house and lived downstairs, he went to high school and worked nights at Wendt's, a dairy, as a soda jerk. He lied about his age to get into the army at 17 even before graduation but he always said he was "performing his duty for his country" and always understood it as the just cause of fighting Communism even if he was in fact a kid who needed skills and a job.

He got them. He also got the GI bill and then graduated with a degree in engineering. The people who didn't die in a war like the Korean War continued as walking advertisements -- join the army, learn a skill, get a free education, get a job. It worked -- at least, better than it works now. My father was good with languages, he passed a proficiency test and was sent to Russian school and worked as a linguist for the Army Air Corps (predecessor of the Air Force) in intelligence. He flew up in planes and listened to Soviet pilots chattering and swearing and reported on what they were saying. He left the army with varicose veins from all the marching and sitting in cramped airplanes and jumping out of them now and then, and then went into civilian life to work as a ceramic engineer until his death. He always spoke of the army as a duty, not a career enhancement, and as something that had a lot of suffering and unpleasantness in it.

5) I've come to the idea of supporting conscription not because of the notion John Schindler mentions of saying "if the elites had their own sons serve, they'd have less wars or be more cautious about getting into wars." I don't think that's a proven hypothesis. After all, the Queen of England had her relatives serving in Afghanistan and that didn't make the UK decide they shouldn't get involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

I think it's more like this, however: before, armed service was a path to success -- it meant you could run for political office or advance in a company because you were believed to be merited and trustworthy. But after Vietnam, that ceased. And with the last two wars, it didn't work, even with very decent people deploying; they didn't go run for Congress. I remember meeting a recent new member of Congress at the Foreign Policy Institute who had actually served in the army and it was a total shock -- no Congress people do nowadays. And that's because it's not viewed as a career path -- oh, except for my son's friends who five minutes ago were hanging around Union looking to score weed and playing with iPhones and dropping out of school, and now are supposedly trained enough and smart enough to fight a war. They are getting training, and free education, and they'll get a job, right? But they could barely graduate or get a GED in the NYC high school system, which is an abomination...

So my thinking about conscription works like this: if you had conscription, then you'd get lots more people, smart people, people without illusions that they will "get a job" from serving in the army, people who "get it" about what an army really is for, people who can realize that there's a job to do, a hard and unpleasant and risky job, before they return to civilian life which they would have made for themselves *without the armed forces*.

6) I don't have illusions about the draft. I lived through the Vietnam era, don't forget. I remember that my classmates brothers were drafted, and some of them got killed and it was very sad. Of course, if you were rich and connected, you could get out of the draft, or you could just guard a swimming pool in Texas (a famous example always discussed in that era in our town based on some guy who supposedly really did that). You didn't have to be rich and famous, either, because of the concept of draft deferment if you were in college, or if you had a teaching job. That was how my uncle avoided the draft -- first going to college, then teaching elementary school. I don't think he particularly enjoyed teaching, which was hard and low-paid, but I think he preferred that to going to Vietnam and having a chance of getting killed.

Remember they fixed THAT problem of too many deferments by starting a lottery. And that was really scary. Suddenly, our music teacher and band leader could get drafted. Our neighbours could get drafted. And did. And then some got killed. Of course there was a fair amount of opposition to the war; I went to my first anti-war demonstration when I was 14. But by and large, in small towns outside the big cities, people did their duty. That's how they understood it. They hoped for the best. I worked in the US Post Office with a lot of veterans and disabled veterans, because they got points awarded on the civil service exam for the USPS so that they'd have jobs, and these were serious people who served their country and did their duty.

But "Vietnam vet" in a lot of cases came to mean people who were crazy, drug-abusers, off the grid, bikers, whatever. This idea of "learn a trade, get a job," fell away...

7) Not that many people were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by contrast with other wars. But they were maimed and killed more in real time on the air on instant media and social media and it therefore loomed larger perhaps. And they did in fact get killed in increasing numbers -- numbers that flew in the fact of that "the few, the proud" propaganda and the "learn a trade, get a job" shill.

8) Our armed forces are really, really hurting. And I don't think that's because they are "stretched thin" in "two long wars". That is, sure, they take their toll. World War II was "only" six years and the Korean War was "only" three years -- but more people died in them than in these wars. I actually think the "set and setting" problem of the Army recruiment propaganda and the kinds of people they wind up attracting with that misleading promise of "skills and jobs" are central to the problem. The army reflects the problem of society in the family, education, the work place, but itself is serving as an incubator worsening them.

Chelsea Manning is a classic example. She was smart, actually had computer and analytical skills largely self-taught on "the Internet", but was an EDP, to use the cops' lingo, an "emotionally disturbed person" who flopped around not knowing what to do, with an alcoholic and abusive dad or something, with identity issues, who felt the army would not only give her "a good education and a good job" where the regular economy hadn't, but would also "pull her together". It didn't. The rest is history.

Edward Snowden is another good example. We never learn how this high-school drop-out, also with an absentee dad, who seemed to also have good self-taught Internet-learned skills, felt he had to go in the army -- where he promptly broke both legs, instead of "learning a skill and getting a good job". Even so, he migrated toward related national security work, but questions remain: how clueless do you have to be to break not one, but two legs in basic training? Maybe you're "an indoor cat" who shouldn't have joined and no one should have let you? Or how negligent do the armed services have to be? We don't know. But Ed was not "good people" for the real job of the army, which is serving your country and fighting a war, not getting an all-expense paid training and job placement program.

And there are more, and higher-level fuck-ups -- but first, a personal story.

8) My own son went and joined the Marines but didn't finish the process and now is ineligible for service. I wasn't thrilled with the idea, but he was of age, and it was his decision and I thought (I'm not immune to the propaganda, either), he might "learn a trade and get a good job" where these things had failed in civilian life.

He went through various physical and written exams, briefing sessions, interviews, etc. and was getting ready to ship out to Parris Island. But then due to a confluence of various circumstances in his own life and the draw-down being announced, there were delays and then he began to get cold on the idea. For one, the recruiting officer began to tell him that he really should stay in college, then go in the Marines, it would only be better for him to go into higher-level training. Also, I won an electric motorcycle at TechCrunch Disrupt with the express pitch that I hoped it would be something that would keep him out of the Marines because I didn't want him to be sent to Afghanistan and be one of the last people to become disabled or die there (and I guess fate rewarded us there...Man proposes, God disposes...)

I had reasons to believe this would be the case that he would die, or worse, become disabled. Naturally he had more of a chance of becoming disabled in a motorcycle accident, and sadly that's exactly what happened.

But even as he used that argument to persuade me that Afghanistan was going to be "safe," I could see that for this kid, even my own son whose father was jailed in a Soviet psychiatric hospital because he refused to go in the army when Czechoslovakia was being invaded, there was only the haziest notion of the war in Afghanistan, despite all my work in human rights and the UN and discussing the issues at home, and only the foggiest concept of any mission or duty. To country, to society, let alone to vulnerable people overseas whose country was overrun with thugs.

But there was much, much more prevelant in his thinking was that he was going to "get training" and "get a good job". The Cisco network training which his high school provided -- which he didn't finish -- didn't grab him. But somehow, the army -- which would amount to the same thing only with the chance to get up early in the morning, eat grub, run around like hell and then have a chance to die -- was going to do it.

In real life, in the civilian sector, prospects for somebody with less than a year in college, which he didn't like, were not great -- he worked variously many hours a week for low pay as an insurance salesman, a cell phone salesman, an electricity salesman, a computer repairman and it was all going nowhere. Occupy sent a very powerful message even to this family that definitely opposed Occupy and its Marxist politics: if you load up on college debt, you may not be abe to pay it back for years and you may not get a good job. The army looked attractive in those circumstances, when your prospects were years more of selling insurance and going to school nights. It's too bad they were winding down the wars, eh? Everywhere the message went out to stop recruiting so heavily and now they can afford to pick better people.

Recruiting officers tell kids now -- hey, go back to school. Hey, you have that drug charge or that robbery charge? Well, we can still let you in, but now we're going to look for people with cleaner records. You didn't do very well on the test because you didn't pay attention and barely graduated from high school? Well, we're going to find people who are better than you now. But that isn't what they did for the last ten years, and it shows.

9) The people at the top in the military have let us down appallingly. I am still trying to understand this. How could this happen? Some years ago I was interviewed by Rolling Stone and appeared in a story there about Second Life and I know exactly what they do with you: they make fun of you. Deliberately. I knew that going into it. That's what they do if you aren't a rock star, duh! I can't imagine being so stupid as to hang out with their reporters and drink and tell them stories. You'd have to be ignorant or so vain that they could play on your vanity. So much for McChrystal, who I thought was a lot smarter.

Petraeus -- what the hell? You have this exemplary career, you have this incredibly important duty to perform with many people depending on you and your country's safety and reputation at stake, and you screw it up by letting this manipulative biographer get you into an affair and then expose you to scandal? What? How vain and stupid do you have to be?

Bales. You sound like a person who had lots of problems before you deployed that you thought the army would fix for you. Either your vanity and belief you could do what you couldn't led you to back-to-back deployments, or somebody in charge of deployment had the poor judgement to deploy you (what, they ran out of job-seekers and stupid drug users in New York City?) But all in all, the set and setting seems to have contributed to the appalling massacre of innocent Afghan civilians you should have been taking the utmost care to protect. Didn't you have any sense of duty?

And Carey. Gosh, I could almost understand the back stories of Manning and the others, maybe it's just human nature. But my God, what an asshole. Getting drunk with the Russians?! With known operatives serving as honey pots from the GRU? While you are responsible for nuclear weapons?! What are you fucking stupid? Or is it so vain that you think you can do no wrong? I'm just BAFFLED.

So you can see that I find a theme here -- vanity. Telling little darlings they are wonderful. Special. Only the few, the proud. That they will advance their lovely careers. That they will turn from losers into productive members of society because they will "get trained and get a job". It reminds me of all the Yuppie moms in the playground with their endless ego-boosting of their toddlers, and their endless, inexhaustive ability to empathize with the wants and needs of their little monsters instead of setting limits and insisting on good behaviour.

"Use your indoor voice, Tommy" or "We don't throw sand, Janie" or "what do you need, apple juice? A graham cracker? a Samsung tablet?" instead of getting a "No, stop that, or we're leaving" or "no, snack-time is at 4 pm, it's not time yet."

You know what I mean?

And all of this is horribly, horribly wrong. We need to change all this, radically. From top to bottom. it isn't even so much about changing to a draft versus voluntary -- it's about THIS. It's about GETTING RID of the idea that the army is here to serve YOU, instead of you SERVING THE ARMY. It's about finding people who could get a job in civilian life, but choose to do this other, harder thing because they love their country. It's about setting up the expectations right, and weeding out the EDPs better. It's about saying "You're not going to get anything out of this, and might lose your leg." It's about ending the "heroics" of the "surprise dad" and that brave soul learning to walk on artificial limbs who had the misfortune to have a "training accident" while he was in his "job program". It's about creating fighting men and women who fight like they're going to win, who get that war is sacrifice, not self-aggrandizement.

It's a hard and tricky thing. On the one hand, you want to instill a sense of mission, of responsibility, of America's role in the world. On the other hand, you don't want this:

Ms. [REDACTED] states that Maj Gen Carey was visibly agitated about the long delay at Zurich, he appeared drunk and, in the public area, talked loudly about the importance of his position as commander of the only operational nuclear force in the world and that he saves the world from war every day.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

And so on. You get the idea.

People who have a sense of a purpose higher than themselves before which they become humble, not arrogant.

It used to be religious upbringing accomplished this, or perhaps life on a family farm. Then maybe school or civic clubs could provide it. Nothing provides it anymore.

There's just the Internet.

I'm not an expert and I don't know how this can be accomplished. But not only experts should get to decide these things. All citizens get a say in their votes and in their freedom of expression.

Once again, we're supposed to take cynicism as a substitute for insight, and we're supposed to see penetrating wisdom in the commonplace phenomenon that yeah, people are idealistic and don't ground themselves in RealPolitik -- and then the junior analysts of IR can pronounce them as stupid -- too stupid to know what they want or know how to get it.

Oh, this posture that people are poorly informed, sloppy researchers, naive, or confused -- instead of simply moral.

It's like a textbook case of, "Nizi ne mogut, a verkhi ne khotyat," as Lenin cynically said about the pre-revolutionary period and revolution: "Those at the botton can't, and those at the top, won't," i.e. reform, or make revolution. Oh, and that's why they need that advanced guard, that guiding intellectual Party elite, see.

Here's the thing about film festivals and the drones thing in general -- they are emotional, and the topic is emotional, and it's about morality and moral feelings -- and that's okay because drones throw up real moral issues of:

o secrecy

o claims of precision that are uncheckable due to secrecy

o fears of greater power due to claims of precision

Foust always behaves in a magnetic moral context as if all the magnet filings are going in the wrong direction and it's all their fault.

But there's really nothing wrong with people protesting drones, as such, although both in Pakistan and the US, it is a totemic symbol of American power used in political movements for their own purposes.

I wonder if Foust really understands that when he hears the facile and ready anti-Americanism and hysteria about drones in Pakistan, and the call to build schools and hospitals instead of throwing drones (as he heard from the Yemen activist that he mercilessly bullied on Twitter the other day), that this is placebo politics -- it's a surrogate. In an odd way, for this generation, for these people, this American-hating is a placebo for the critique they really ought to have (and do have, in an inchoate way) for their own oppressive and abusive and kleptocratic governments which are busy helping terrorists in some ways.

There's this, too: it's just no good telling off Pakistanis and others at a human rights film festival that no, it's not a violation of sovereignty because they were invited in because they weren't part of that voluntary process. And wait, has he no sense of resonance in this region and with history? That's what the Soviets said about the tanks coming into Afghanistan or before that, Prague or Budapest. They were invited in to help save the socialist order.

Even if there is indeed a world of difference between Soviet tanks and American drones and the inviting process is more, shall we say, fluid, the fact is, Pakistan is not a democracy; people in it did not get to chose; the parliamentary doesn't have power over the military; all this is obvious. Why talk about "inviting" in a setting where clearly some political forces didn't get to participate democratically in that decision, and some feel marginalized by the process?

Leave aside the issue of whether it would be "good for the country" to have more drones kill more terrorists in an undemocratic way and oh, maybe hasten demoracy that way, as an engineering proposition. The fact is, it doesn't sound like a persuasive argument, and there has to be some sensitivity to this.

You have to wonder why the organizers invited Foust. Do they like getting lashed?!

The other day I was talking to a colleague from the establishment human rights movement, so to speak, who was trying earnestly to make the case for drones as in fact a new kind of human rights instrument because it is more and more precise and after all, that's what we should work toward with international humanitarian law (IHL), the laws of war -- precision, which means less casualities.

That struck me as a technocratic argument of the sort we hear about everything now all the time, especially with the Internet.

But, before that, there was always a debate between whether the proper subject of the human rights movement was even IHL or should stick only to human rights. No one remembers this any more, but it is worth recalling that there were some strong voices saying that the human rights movements should stick to human rights, and not get into the laws of war or crimes because those issues were better parsed by law-enforcers and militaries -- and of course the ICRC -- because they involved first suppressing what might be an act of conscience opposing war in the first place.

I kept saying that the remoteness of the control over the missiles was creepy and seemed a matter of conscience. My colleague kept saying, but the weapons are more precise now and don't cause as much collateral damage.

But here's the thing about all this then: they are secret, and housed in the CIA. And not "just because"; but precisely as a function of their precision. That is, precisely because they are precise, the information about them has to be wrapped up very tight to remain successful. There was just this unfortunate habit of terrorists hanging out in their home compounds with the whole family.

The other day I was listening to a "progressive" talk radio program dissecting the Rand Paul filibuster and rallying for Obama. One woman called in and spoke fautously of how people who wouldn't agree to Obama's budget should be arrested for "obstruction of justice" -- as if that's what it meant. She had the determined and matter-of-fact ire of someone who wasn't quite educated enough to know that the meaning of the phrase wasn't quite what she wanted (and Foust approaches all human rights activists as being like that woman). Yet despite all that, she had an essential point, from her perspective as an Obama voter -- if the president won, why can't he do what he wants?

Then a man called in whose son was a drone pilot. He described his son as "flying the planes" even though he was located in the United States and not physically flying them there. But he said, "But it's still flying the planes". There were people in Afghanistan or Pakistan who did the ground work and scoped out the area, of course. Then the people who "flew the planes" from the US. He said so much expense, care, training and precision! -- went into this that it would be "inconceivable" that it would be misused on somebody sitting in a cafe in San Francisco.

We're told that people who "fly the planes" even from thousands of miles away like this still get post-traumatic stress syndrome from killing people. But really, what's the difference between 30,000 feet up in the air, and 3,000 miles away? You're still looking at an electronic dashboard nowadays and you can't see what you hit? So shouldn't we accept this as "better" because it's more precise?

Again, the secrecy and housing within the CIA then is the problem -- it has less oversight then from Congress, and victims can't be compensated as they are when the military accidently kills them in ordinary bombings.

A band of eager lawyers and technologists who want to prove that war is "better" because it is more precise now perhaps make a more humane military, if you will, or they make a civil society of sorts that acts perhaps as a brake on military that might want to do things with less precision or expense, let's say. Foust would like to turn the human rights organizations into something like this -- appendages of the military with troubled looks on their faces about "going to far" but essentially getting with the program.

But it shouldn't then be called a human rights movement of conscience -- and that's okay to have, because in the face of the technologists, they have to say: but it's secret, so we don't know; but that kid was killed, so we're not sure.

It's not just the secrecy -- itself dictated by that very precision. It's then the psychological and political impact on other countries. Sure, corrupt governments whip up anti-American sentiment and weak oppositions faced with vicious persecution and even death convert their positions into anti-American placebos. But ordinary people, too, then begin to get caught up in the sense of feeling helpless and pinned by stronger, more precise, more deadly force out there.

We saw what resonance the #StandwithPaul stuff had on Twitter and even in the real world, and how people could somehow come to see that maybe, really, they could be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco, and...

If that much agitation could come just from the *thought* of such a situation, and the reality of only two cases of American citizens, imagine if you were in a setting where thousands of people were killed that way, and you didn't know if maybe hundreds of them weren't militants but were just kids or women and old men. Such it's a psychological situation, if nothing else, and one meriting sympathy.

Foust could only sniff:

A similar mindset afflicted the panel on Afghanistan, where outrage overpowered reason. Jawed Taiman’s documentary
about Afghans’ views of the future was done very well, but the audience
was raucous and bordered at times on hostile. Panelists and audience
members alike blamed everything on America, on Pakistan, or on the
military. Most said that Afghanistan would be just fine once the
foreigners leave – a conclusion many Afghans don’t share.

Really? But the link is to a New York Times article about "strivers" and a budding "middle class" -- certainly a thin concept in Afghanistan where most people are poor. Those people have not been better off with NATO troops there for the last ten years; it just didn't work in a lot of places. That's not to suggest the Taliban and company are better, but the reason we're leaving is that we have to concede it didn't work.

@DaveedGR@joshuafoust Nobody can take the moral ground simply; it is always viewed as a "luxury" by those not in power. That's nonsense tho

I always come back to that Bonfire of the Vanities insight:

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals -- male humiliation?

While precision should in theory make the ordinary man more secure that he won't be caught up in a mass conflagration and the enemy is only going to target the bad guys very selectively, the government can exploit the "eye in the sky" fears that come with that precision.

Then the precision perhaps might be the very trigger of his immense feeling of helplessness and therefore greater anger.

This is about culture, and psychology and group dynamics, and I have a feeling that even the "human terrain" expert Joshua Foust isn't really good at navigating these things because the RealPolitik is too captivating. Who wouldn't want to be the president's aide instead of the injured child?

03/06/2013

Gen. Petraeus meets President Karimov in Tashkent in 2009. Photo: US Embassy in Tashkent.

Sarah Kendzior has a perfectly dreadful article posted on AlJazeera where she is a frequent contributor. "Does it matter if the West gives military aid to Uzbekistan?" she asks, sucking a thumb that she has turned up in fact for military aid because she's never seriously questioned it. She and the other gaggle of former defense analysts at Registan.net generally support the status quo of US policy -- and that means supporting these regimes, albeit with occasional criticism for credibility's sake -- because we need them to get in and out of the war in Afghanistan.

AlJazeera has a skewed view of the world tilting to the anti-American, pro-Palestinian, "progressive" line that dovetails with Kendzior's crowd -- and they censor or just don't cover stories. I had never known them to censor comments that were legitimate, i.e. not spam or obscene, but for some reason, I saw my comment disappear, and then when I tried to respond to Richard Szulewski, I couldn't post.

I have a few articles in the queue of Kendzior's I've been meaning to sit down and analyze for their flaws in thinking and bad faith, but I put it off until I have the time to really sit for hours and think and analyze line-by-line -- I find most people who have swallowed her line whole need a very careful rebuttal line-by-line or they won't even think of resisting her -- that is if they bother to pay attention in the first place. She is not well known in the fields of either anthropology for Eurasia or in the field of communications or Central Asian studies but she is aggressively making herself known by Twitter, the conference circuit and blogging -- which pass for scholarship these days.

Her article is a stupendous circle-jerk of thinking, as she links to her own piece in argument ("Stop Talking About Civil Society"); then she links to her fellow believers around Registan and Joshua Kucera, a like-minded comrade from EurasiaNet who turned in an awful piece back in 2011 in the New York Times that said "say and do nothing" about human rights because you can't influence Central Asia anyway. It really was pernicious, and seemed to serve the interests of those on the Hill and at State trying to get the Senate Appropriations committee to drop sanctions on Uzbekistan so they could get some modest military help which was a way of papering over a poor relationships and trying to keep the NDN going. An awful business, and Kucera even took a factoid handout from State later, that no one else got, and published it as evidence that State didn't think human rights progress was necessary really anyway, for exigency factors, even though before, they'd postured about progress as if it *was* necessary to convince reluctant senators concerned about human rights implications. Like I said, a bad business...

But Kendzior's arguments are attractive to the do-nothing RealPolitik crowd, so it's worth thinking them through.

Association for Human Rights in Central Asia proposes siging a petition against military aid. I signed it. Kendzior signed it too but she takes a pirouette to tell us she did it as a matter of private conscience, even if as a public intellectual and thinker, she doesn't believe in it. Way to show your hypocrisy, Sarah. And no need to bother.

Says Kendzior:

Analysts have long debated the ethical and strategic ramifications of providing Uzbekistan with military equipment - largely unidentified but allegedly non-lethal - in exchange for a transport route to neighbouring Afghanistan. But the heated discussion that has emerged has more to do with the moral anxiety of Westerners than with the rights or safety of Uzbeks.

What is intended as activism rooted in a critique of Western
militarism actually amounts to an endorsement of Western effectiveness,
because it rests on the belief that the West has leverage, that our
opinion matters, that the fate of nations hinges on us. The hard truth
is that in places like Uzbekistan, it does not.

Well, that's supposed to mean that we ought not debate, because hard-assed authoritarians are going to be brutal anyway. Well, why not? We can move the slider up and down on this, surely. I will never forget a retiring general of the NDN who said at a conference that he told Petraeus and others that the US shouldn't have prostrated so much to Karimov. We shouldn't have. And neither should Kendzior. And that *is* what she does when she coldly and nastily tells every human rights activist they don't matter and therefore should do nothing, as if their advocacy is merely some bourgeois affectation of blinded Western imperialists who don't realize the evils of their own country or its clients (which is a line that plays nicely into the ALJ narrative).

Yes, it's important to call out public figures' immorality when they get too clever by half. It is immoral.

In fact, it *does* matter. Uzbekistan is avidly trying to keep us as friends so that it doesn't have to go into the arms of Russia and China only. It wants its independence from the former and doesn't want to become dependent on the latter. Oh, and Turkey, too. So they like dealing with the US in terms of business and military matters as it gives them some options and choices. We can exploit that to try to get concessions on political prisoners or terms of how we *are* going to prostrate ourselves which is *not that much*. We should always and everywhere call out the Uzbek regime's bluff -- they claim they need help with terrorism and will be cooperate with the war effort in Afghanistan because of that need? Okay, be helpful then.

But other than a few token political prisoner releases, what the US has gotten is only more expulsions of its own funded projects, and US-based non-governmental groups like Human Rights Watch have been expelled. So that prompts Kendzior to her hard-nosed, callused view of how to see this situation -- which comes straight out of Karimov's vision of himself:

And that is the point. Despite the changing relationship between the
West and Uzbekistan, the brutality of the Karimov government has
remained consistent, impervious to Western influence or Western demands.
Uzbekistan's government will do what it wants regardless of how it
hurts itself or others. There is no carrot and no stick, only cruel,
cold dismissal.

Well, yes and no. Lots of Uzbeks still want to come to the US to study -- and do so and eventually they will grow up and some of them might have some influence on events in their country. Some of them got in political trouble even with very mild educational programs and were forced to remain here -- Kendzior and Registan in fact adopted them. They openly discuss life after Karimov, who will not live forever. So cold or not, cruel or not, dismissal or not, water wears away the stone, exiles discuss, they interact with dissenters inside the country, alternatives are created, the US funds foreign broadcasting, support some NGOs abroad, provides aslyum for some fleeing -- and an alternative political and civic space is made. Certainly more of a political space than would exist if we put Sarah Kendzior in charge of civil society, which she repudiates and says we should stop talking about.

Citing herself, Kendzior discounts that any chaos is coming:

The debate over military aid arrives among speculation that the
departure of NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2014 will leave Central
Asia in chaos, an outcome predicted by severalanalysts. This argument assumes that the NATO presence played a significant role in achieving regional stability, a view I disputed in a recent article showing how Central Asian "peace" is structured on citizens' fear of their own governments.

Well, except, she can't be sure. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And they didn't predict the Andijan uprising and massacre, the Arab Spring and crackdown, the big marches in Russia and crackdown, and so on. If we left it up to these armchair anthropologists that farm out their own surveys to others and don't visit the country to work (and maybe they can't), we wouldn't know anything about unrest in these societies and would be utterly prepared for various scenarios. Oh, I guess we do that a lot, then. But...You have to keep an open mind. Kendzior does not have one. She keeps hammering the same RealPolitik message home as if somebody's budget depends on it. And probably somebody's budget does, and I don't mean her university's.

Kendzior believes ANY talk about possible terrorism or militarism and unrest are just ridiculous. That's insane! This is an area that *does* have some instances of terrorism, even if some are manufactured. There are something like 8,000 Muslim prisoners in jail. Many of them were wrongfully jailed, and that means their relatives are held down only by fear and intimidation -- and that may not last forever, like it didn't last forever in Egypt where people were tortured. We have to care, and we have to develop ways of engaging the regime while in power, those people if they are released and come to power, and everyone else.

She then claims that Akrimaya "didn't exist". But I've heard Uzbek exiles speak openly of its existence as a fact including some that took part in it -- and by that they don't mean some terrorist operation like Al Qaeda, but a Muslim businessmen's society. Here's what I said on ALJ in case it is removed:

It isn't so material to determine whether Akromiya is "real" or not, i.e. was it a fundamentalist Islamist group bent on terror. It was a group of Muslim businessmen who helped each other. And they went to break their fellow businessman out of jail because they thought his jailing on charges of corruption was unfair, and knowing the lack of due process in that country, that is likely. But then they killed policemen and took others as hostages and then human shields as they faced down government troops. So they committed violence, that's wrong, that's illegal, and the human rights groups protesting this massacre always seem to skip over that part way too lightly. Yes, there seemed to have been a lot of women and children who peacefully gathered in the square who were then mowed down by government troops. But government tanks and troops can rationalize their massive human rights violations when the incidents are started by gunmen doing a jail break and a shoot-out, you know?

I think it's the right thing to do not to sell this government lethal weapons. We will not pry them loose from Russia or help them fight terrorism by doing that. Once troops are removed from Afghanistan, we should not be so craven to them. We should attempt to engage them with a series of incremental steps and if they reform or make concessions, adjust our behaviour accordingly.

What's so awful about Kendzior's ideas is that she winds up with an unjustified quietism and endorsement of the status quo -- the authoritarian regime about which we should do nothing because we have no leverage.

But what happens when you mount academic theses that unrest can "never
happen here" or that Islamic fundamentalism "can't happen" is that you
are unprepared with policies when it does. If you've assured the world
that there is no Hizb-ut-Tahrir problem whatsoever, forgetting even that
there might be if the prison policy changes (and it must if we are to
insist on our human rights ideals) -- then when a country *does* grow
more religious, even shy of the extremities of HuT, decision-makers are
unprepared. If you've spent years telling everyone that Islamic
fundamentalism in Tajikistan isn't really a problem any more and the
civil war is over and the threat is exaggerated, then you have no
framework to understand that pretty much all significant dissent in
Tajikistan seems to take the form of Muslim activism, and then
policy-makers may view what is normal and natural for a country as
suddenly a threat. The very analysis that seeks to minimize unrest or
religious revival in opposition to mythical promoters of these concepts
then winds up fueling the hysteria they claimed to see in the first
place.

Kendzior concludes by making it seem as if she is nuanced and thoughtful -- although she's told everyone to stop talking about civil society, she's told everyone that it is pointless to sign petitions, and she's told everyone there is no terrorist threat -- so it's all a sleight of hand and a propagandistic manipulation:

Uzbekistan poses the tough question of what should be done about a
country that does not respect international law or its own citizens.
There are no easy answers, but one way to start is by acknowledging that
the solution does not hinge on Western action, for good or for ill.

Focusing on military aid addresses Western hypocrisy - a subject
notable in its own right - but does little to address the everyday
challenges Uzbek citizens face. As the issue of Western military aid
brings renewed focus on Uzbekistan, we should make sure we do not
neglect the quiet, more pervasive forms of violence, the routine
brutality that takes place away from foreign eyes.

ALJ eats up anything that talks about "Western hypocrisy" but "Western hypocrisy" is the least of the world's problems because it's dictated by the world's far worse problems: Pakistani intelligence support of the Taliban and related groups; the Taliban and its supporters itself; Al Qaeda; Assad in Syria; Bashir in Sudan and the ongoing state-sponsored civil war, essentially; Putin in Russia and the suppression of civil society there; China hacking the US and suppressing its minorities and extracting resources to grow stronger. Kendzior seldom waxes eloquent on the hypocrisy of any of these abusive forces.

Indeed, the situation in part *does* depend on Western policy in support of internal actors. It has never depended on anything else. Nobody brought about a spring in Prague or Cairo by themselves; they had solidarity if nothing else, but more often somebody to help pay for printing presses, and today, circumvention software. It's a myopic, cynical and most of all immoral view (posing as amoral and pratical). There's nothing wrong with basing American foreign policy on morals.

Whenever
a person starts a supposedly serious article with the phrase..."the
Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, a group comprised mainly
of exiles from Uzbekistan,"

It shows that further reading is not necessary.

Ms. Kendzior...we get it. As a recent Anthropology PHD your insights
are INCREDIBLY valuable to world affairs. You completely understand
central Asian politics and the intricacies of Geo-politics...

Or it could be that you hate America and are willing to use this
incredibly valuable loudspeaker called AJE to bash anything pro-western.

AKROMIYA is real. YOU have debunked nothing and claims otherwise
shows your sheer hubris. My experience in the nation directly
contradicts your claims and will be happy to show you proof of the same.
Uzbekistan is a nation struggling to find itself after decades under
the Soviet thumb. Troubles? Yes. Evil? No.

And you left a quote out M'am..."The threat may not be imminent, but
extending security assistance to the Central Asian states is
justifiable, Blake maintained."

Please Ma'm...stop your attempts at political analysis. You are embarrassing yourself.

02/20/2013

All I ask of "progressives" is a little...perspective. A little balance, at the very least!

I'm not like Joshua Foust. I don't justify drones in any way. I have grave misgivings about how moral it is to be battling by remote control as if you were in a video game like this. I'm not persuaded that the supposed good done from drones -- taking out various terrorist leaders who are known to attack US troops (and that's why I don't put "suspects" coyly around the term) -- outdoes the harm. The harm is turning the population against you if you have too much "collateral damage" -- or any, especially if it's children.I haven't been persuaded, like a lot of people, that the good achieved in curbing terrorism has been outweighed by the wrongs perpetrated against the innocents and the incitement of anger and hatred in the population.

But hey, let's get a little perspective on this, shall we? I don't even mean the perspective that might come from examining the actual terrorists killed and examining their actual bad deeds -- something that the press should do more of than it does.

I mean the perspective that comes from looking at other bad things in the region, and seeing what they're about, too, which, like Iraq, comes from admitting that the overwhelming majority of civilians are killed not by US troops or NATO troops but by the Taliban and its allies, i.e. terrorists.

Yesterday, I had to watch as all the liberal youth shared around with each other hundreds of thousands of times a picture taken with Instagram of a child's head in the sights of a sniper's gun. The child wasn't killed; it was just a picture of a sniper showing a child in his sights. This picture, whose provenance was said to be somewhere else online (which I couldn't find, using Google image search), was posted by a young IDF soldier. And so lefties like Jillian York @jilliancyork who has openly advocated a "one-state solution" that would involve obviously diluting the Israeli population deliberately and changing the nature of its society, were part of what spread this picture around (she has something like 26,000 followers around the world). Her comment? To put in scare quotes "the most humane army in the world". I don't know who says this or whether its an IDF motto, but I think we'd have to concede that by contrast to lots of other things in the world, including the US military, the IDF is more careful - it has gotten so through vast experience -- about trying to avoid the killing of civilians.

So today, we read all the stories of 90 Shi'a Pakistanis killed by Islamist terrorists who don't like their brand of Islam. That's just one day. Ninety people! People who were so angry that they refused to bury their dead in protest. Imagine, for Muslims whose religious ritual demands that they bury the dead quickly. Then, the pictures of Western news services of wailing people clinging to dead bodies with the headline "Letting Go," as if they need therapy, and a recognition of the Western-devised stages of grief, instead of continuing their outrage at the abnormality of losing civilians in this fashion, due to terrorism.

And none of those hundreds of thousands of Twitterers who could cluck in indignation at an Israeli soldier putting up an indecent and vicious picture of a sniper with a child in his sights could find it in their hearts to protest the mass murder of these 90 -- from one day. And there are incidents like that constantly, which is why the numbers of civilians killed by terrorists in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya are so much greater than by any Western troops involved. Not to mention the 60,000 or more killed in Syria, many children. Never one-tenth of the rage about *that*, sponsored by Russia, in contrast with the fueld outrage of the BDS movement over Israel.

So along comes the New York Times, which in its quest for readership and clicks and revenue is now putting up cartoons and interactive thingies to try to attract the Internet children upon whom their future relies. The NYT would never have published such a crude, propagandistic screed in its pages as journalism or even an op-ed piece, but the lure of interactivity and visuals let them put up Drew Carie's clever anti-drone propaganda.

Propaganda, because he crudely portrays a KGB agent as gleefully gloating over the US "becoming not like itself" -- which of course only distracts from the fact that among the clients for drones in the world is Vladimir Putin, a real KGB agent who is really in power, not just in a cartoon. And so on.

Propaganda, because not only does he create a one-sided if funny cartoon without any sense of context about the rest of the world, he actually has the nerve to cite Zamyatin's We -- a work of literature protesting the Soviet Union -- and make it somehow morally equivalent to the United States.

Propaganda -- because to the extent the US has become like Jeremy's Panopticon, it's more due to Google than the NSA.

Propaganda -- because in fact, as the cartoon shows, forces opposed the use of drones in Seattle and stopped them.

My response below, in the NYT comments.

***

By making his fictional character as a KGB
man gleeful that America has become like his own agency, ostensibly from
the Cold War, he handily distracts from the fact that the real dangers
from drones will not come from America, which is a liberal democratic
state under the rule of law with a free press, but from Russia, which
still has an actual KGB agent as its leader, or China or other
authoritarian states that jail cartoonists like Drew Christie instead of
publishing them in a leading newspaper. It creates hysterical
self-absorption by the "progressives" who fuel their fantasy that
America is the greatest evil in the world.

Putting the focus on
the government's surveillance also has the function of distracting from
Google and Facebook other Big IT companies that do far more surveillance
of us, with our avid and enthusiastic participation, than any
government drone, and with far less recourse to due process. Google is
making an unmanned car and will be able to further scrape data from your
every movement once you start using it, and nobody is caring about
that, only big scary Obama drones or Seattle drones. I'm all for
watching those, as they shouldn't be run by the CIA and innocent people
have been killed by them and their families cannot even be compensated
because they are in a secret program.

As usual, there is no
perspective on the left. Obama kills two US citizens deemed to be
terrorists; in Pakistan in just one day, 90 Muslims were killed by their
fellow Muslims.

The premise is basically -- oh, you civilians and peaceniks filled with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as the geeks called it)! You just don't get it and you just aren't cool because you can't realize how efficient drones are and don't realize how much we already use robotic stuff. Silly you, and stupid you! And smart me!

My answer:

The reason a lot of science fiction is scary is not because it's about machines, but because it's about people -- people against other people, and not under a shared sense of the rule of law.

The computer code that runs the killing machines is made by humans and is a concretization of their will, not something uncontrollable or entirely automatic and escaped from their control.

More importantly, the decisions about where to deploy the machines that involve targets drawn from Panatir data-dredging, or heat-seeking missiles or counter-mortar systems are made by humans. Before drones are deployed, humans sometimes have to do things like call up leaders of countries and seek their intelligence and their clearance. So, in the first place, nothing that is portrayed here as automatic is in fact as automatic as Foust strangely makes it seem, because it's in a context and a system where humans do make decisions about the very theaters of war in the first place.

Yet precisely because in our time, the weapons are far more automated, and in the case of drones, there is a greater acceleration and precision -- and therefore ease and seeming moral comfort -- in their use, we have to look at the moral dimension. Foust seems content if drones just don't miss very often or don't have much collateral damage. But if they get so easy to use, won't the temptation be to do more killing with them and make them more automatic? Where will it stop and who will be authorized to make the judgement call?

There's also the question of whether it's really the case that drones *are* so precise, given how many reports there are from human rights groups and local lawyers about non-combatants, including children, who are hit. These victims can't seek compensation, as their counterparts killed by regular US or NATO actions with more traditional weapons can, because drones are in a secret program run by the CIA, and not the military. This is apparently because of the need to keep them secret, apparently particularly from the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So this raises questions of governance, as to whether we can morally retain these weapons as secret and unaccountable, and whether we should put them under the regular armed forces' leadership.

More automation can in fact decouple the moral imperative from the results of the action of weapons particularly because of the acceleration and capacity for devastation.

Foust has a curious coda to yet another unconscionable piece in defense of drones as efficient war-machines -- he posits the idea that a less active role by people -- i.e. less compunction about use and nature of targets and consequences -- could somehow be a goal, and that more automation need not diminish our values. How?

In fact, if these programs reflect our values, they would have to become less secret, and attacks less common. Foust has already stripped away the moral context by pretending to find all kinds of "good" uses of "automation" that in fact a) aren't automation as he claims because of the prior choices about war in the first place, and theaters of war, and targets and b) have more unintended consequences than he prepares to admit.

As Foust notes, the Pentagon released a directive on "appropriate levels of human judgement," but Foust seems to think the radiant future can contain more automated processes if we can just all agree on our priorities.

There's nothing wrong with a cultural heritage that seems autonomous robots as deadly; they are. Pentagon planners and the CIA don't wish to kill civilians who are not combatants. Yet they do. They do because the targets often tend to have their families around them and the military can't wait until they get into the clear. That's the crux of the problem.

There's a strange notion that raising any moral questions about killing machines, as Human Rights Watch has done, is motivated by "fear". It seems simply to be more motivated by morality, and also the practical sense that machines don't have consciences, and code never renders human interaction as perfectly as real life.

The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.

The son of a Pakistani man killed in a strike in Waziristan last year has brought an action against the Foreign Office in an attempt to make it state publicly whether it provides intelligence to the United States for drone attacks.

Warfare. Lawfare?

I do believe that drones as I've written are essentially immoral because of the removal and distance from the target and because of the apparently high level of collateral damage, despite the claims of precision.

To be sure, this new round of actions and articles is based on the same information we've had for months, estimating the roughly "400-800" civilians that may have been killed in the 3,000 strikes -- and there is no new sources to corroborate this information. That means that critics pounce on this scarcity of sources, and that even when prestigious individuals like Columbia law students write reports asking questions about drones, if they don't use anything but this one source, they are opening themselves up to Faustian jousting.

Having heard Akbar speak and having asked him a number of questions, I have no reason not to take what he is saying at face value. He himself was precise in his reporting, and stuck to the story of his clients, not exaggerating, and not indulging in the rhetoric and politics of his sponsors on the US speaking tour, CODE PINK. When I asked him how many people were injured, as opposed to killed, and was there a higher number as there are with land mines, he matter-of-factly acknowledged that no, drones are more precise and therefore injure less people, and kill their targets -- the issue is that there often other people near them like family members.

Today Suzanne Nossel, the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA put out an urgent e-mail alert regarding drones in connection with the presidential elections, in the hope that either or both candidates would mention them in the debates tonight:

There are many things we don't know about U.S. drone policy, for
example, the government's rules of engagement for drone attacks. Drone
missions and strategy operate under a shroud of secrecy. But what we do
know is scary -- the deliberate killing of individuals deemed by the
U.S. government to be terrorism suspects, far from any recognized
battlefield and without charge or trial, raises grave concerns that the
U.S. is committing extrajudicial executions in violation of
international human rights law.

This is an interesting development; Nossel, who formerly served in the Obama Administration in the international organizations department of the State Department, working on the UN Human Rights Council in particular, has been accused by leftists of somehow being tied to Obama's drone policy merely by being in the Administration.

This is unfair, as Nossel worked for two years in human rights, not in the Pentagon and was unrelated to drones. Even so, the mere presence in the evil Amerikan imperialist power is enough to set off these haters.

Amnesty -- which decides policies like this at its London HQ, not in the US -- has decided that killing people extrajudicially in a war without a trial is itself a human rights crime.

That's definitely a topic for debate, as the counterfactual for these human rights groups is that in fact, war isn't illegal; it just has to be fought by rules. Those rules include not killing civilians. It's odd -- would Amnesty accept a uniformed soldier killing another uniformed soldier in a war, say, over an invasion of a country, or an unprovoked attack, but it would not accept that same state killing a terrorist not in uniform, a non-state actor, who had launched that attack hosted from a country?

This is part of that whole school of thinking -- for which Obama is famous -- of conceiving of terrorism as a crime, an offense in the criminal code, a police matter, and not a matter of warfare.

In any event, the operative point here is the shroud of secrecy. Victims of mistakes by US military air attacks get compensation from the US. But drone victims don't -- because the program is secret. So at a minimum the program should not be run by the CIA -- since when is the CIA engaged in massive, direct armed warfare, as distinct from intelligence gathering -- and the occasional extradicial assassination for which it usually faces reproaches? I will let people like Scott Horton or Ken Anderson figuire out what is legal and illegal here about the CIA, but it seems that secret programs that target people abroad -- and then miss -- are fraught with problems and violations of human rights.

Akbar noted that he does not take up the cases of militants injured by drones or of relatives seeking compensation for militants killed by drones -- although he believes someone should defend them. Yet he also described how hard it was to tell who the militants were -- making that seem like NATO's problem, not his, i.e. they make mistakes because they can't tell a 15-year-old boy or a male who just happens to be at a militant's home apart from an armed militant. But yet he makes the claim that he can distinguish militants enough not to accept them as clients. Well, there it is.

What I think is key here is focusing on victims, because focusing on militants is a hall of mirrors. First identifying who really is a victim, as distinct from a combatant, and then focusing on justice for them -- and prevention of new ones. And even if you can't tell who the militants are per se, you can tell a 7-year-old whose legs are blown off, or an unarmed 15-year-old whose eye is lost, from an armed adult.

The cynics and the pragmatists trying to be useful to the Administration and get positions with power , like Joshua Foust or Christine Fair, either get all meta and say that the real problem is government itself and its whole architecture of wars, or get all concern-troll and say that drones are regrettably necessary in a situation where ground troops invading areas like the tribal territories would lead to huge numbers of civilian and military casualties.

I think it's more than fine to keep asking questions about deadly drones, just like nuclear bombs, and keep demanding an end to secrecy and justice for victims.

And that's what CODE PINK has been doing, of course, but in a very one-sided fashion, as has been noted by a number of people -- certainly more on social media these days than in the old days, when the one-sided pro-Soviet nature of these groups would go virtually unchallenged except for a handful of faith groups and conscientious objectors.

Meredith Tax of the Center for Secular Space is bravely trying to fight this one-sidedness on her blog and at Open Democracy, and maintain a critique both of the US drone program and its alarming impact in Pakistan, but also condemn the Taliban, and Pakistan's support of it.

Brave, because to post on Open Democracy means to be endlessly nettled by British Islamists who drive away any liberal human rights writer there who criticizes anything about fundamentalist Islam as somehow in the pay of that evil Amerika I mentioned. (It isn't even that they are what drives you away; what drives you away is the bad faith of the moderators and the refusal of people to counter the haters.)e

I see that infamous cantloginas_Momo -- who is the evidently banned Momo back on an alt that the moderators can't see their way clear to banning -- is still trying to bedevil people trying to be even-handed like Meredith. I remember years ago wasting time on him. Time justified only if there are young people looking over his shoulder who may still be reached with reason.

And that's why I don't go to Open Democracy much anymore -- I know that you will face anonymous ankle-biters like Momo who just endlessly heckle and harass, and few people come to defense of the liberal values that supposedly OD represents. OD also tilts to the left, and just isn't my thing. It's a shame, as there aren't very many sites that cover human rights, and cover it without the really leftist bias of Democracy Now. OD is critical of Russia, which the American left seldom takes on.

The discussion among feminists -- pro and con regarding CODE PINK and charges of one-sidedness -- is far more interesting and productive than the one dominated by Momo as per usual at OD. So join in here.

when
Western states or NGOs give prizes to activists like Malala, when the
US ambassador meets with her or when an NGO awards her an honor, does
this help or hurt by making her a target?

And the answer was:

RFE/RL Frud
Bezhan answers: Frud Bezhan I think these prizes help raise awareness
of these individuals and help bring their voices, and in many cases,
their plight to the world's attention. I think individuals like Malala
realize the inherent dangers of exposing
themselves to the international media. But I think by speaking up and
entering the international stage they can tell their stories and perhaps
instigate change. Unfortunately, what we have witnessed with Malala is
that there is a price, at least in that region, for standing up for and
safeguarding the ideals you stand for.

I knew the answer to the question already, in a way, because I've always heard activists advocate publicity for themselves and their cause, and solidarity, and that they would be the judge as to the risks involved.

Yet when it comes to Pakistan, the risks are so high, I wondered really if that advice stood. It seems it does. It was always good advice in the Soviet-style countries but they didn't resort to violence as much; when the non-state actors came on the scene capable of murdering journalists and human rights defenders, and when we began to deal with deadly suppression of countries like Iran, I wondered if the same rules did appply. I felt I had to ask and hear it from those in the region in their own words.

Not everyone agrees. Amna Buttar is a human rights activist who left her career as a doctor
in the United States to work with Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. She writes in the Times "Room for Discussion":

We need to keep our attention fixed on the women and children of
Pakistan. They don't need special envoys, drones, or even foreign aid.
What they need is for ordinary citizens of the world to see them through
a new lens. What Pakistanis need is compassion. Ordinary citizens of
the world have to make Malala and others feel their sympathy for them.

Well, how can we really help without special envoys and aid -- is it really enough merely to hold a sympathy candlelight vigil? And what's the plan to get rid of the Taliban anyway, if it doesn't include drones?

The Taliban claimed they didn't kill children and didn't aim at children but targeted the ISAF base which they said was a CIA station. Yet they did kill the children. There's been enormous -- and cunning -- ideological spin from the Taliban and Islamist supporters and lefty anti-Western agitators on this -- even claiming Malala was supposedly injured by a drone. She wasn't. She was shot by the Taliban.

I might have gone on worrying about whether the West was helping or harming someone like Malala, but then so many outpourings of sentiment and demonstrations of sympathy began occurring in Pakistan itself.

This surprised me, because I was used to seeing such dissent against the Taliban rather mutely expressed, if at all, and lots of politically-correct anti-sentiment, at least staged by the government, with little or no criticism of the Taliban.

The rally organized by Imran Khan was typical of this one-sided political agitation, and I felt CODE PINK walked right into this -- one of the leftist movements in the US that never seemed to grow beyond Port Huron on their obsession with anti-American and anti-Israel campaigning. I asked on Twitter whether CODE PINK was going to rise to the occasion while they were on a march of solidarity with the Pakistani people over the drones issue whether they'd condemn this shooting.

Interestingly, they did about two days later. They may have felt pressure to do so -- critiques of the Taliban aren't part of their repetoire.

The country's anger is not only directed towards the gunman - though it
has spurred a massive hunt for those responsible for the shooting, with
news breaking on Friday that police had arrested
four suspects in the Swat Valley, where the attack occurred, and had
identified a mastermind, who remained at large. The fury is also
directed towards the Taliban as an organization that would mastermind
such an attack, and that has said it would hurt Malala again if she
survives. More than 50 Islamic scholars affiliated with the Sunni
Ittehad Council (SIC) have issued a joint fatwa calling the attack
un-Islamic. Political party leader Ataf Hussain, from the powerful
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), appealed to his supporters to not attend
prayers led by any cleric that does not condemn the attack.

When was the last time you heard of 50 Sunni scholars issuing a fatway *against* violent attacks?!

There is talk that this case will galvanize an internal Pakistani movement to unite more to oppose the Taliban. I have to wonder how that will fare. If the powerful intelligence agencies themselves support the Taliban, how much can ordinary people oppose this?

Yet even the Taliban is mindful of its image and perhaps will "evolve"? There are some who think they can, and aren't the same Taliban of 2001, and that they have even been forced to concede the existence of girl's schools.

It's creepy to me how those in think thanks (like the non-senior fellow Joshua Foust, leading the pack in drone apologetics) or universities,like Christine Fair, my nemesis, can coldly take the Administration's side on this, all the way making it appear as if this isn't the conservative or neocon view, but the smart, cool "progressive" think to do. What do you call the political stance of these people who so scorn the right but adopt pro-Administration, pro-Russian, etc. positions? If "neoliberal" wasn't already taken as the Marxists' favourite adjective to describe evil Amerikan capitalism, could they be called neo-liberals? Or Democratic hawks? I'm going to ponder this.

The Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s intelligence agency and
military have revealed little about actual targets and outcomes, so we
cannot assess whether the people they were trying to kill were “drone
worthy.”

But then she goes on -- in that vacuum of information! -- to blast those trying to nevertheless work with this issue:

Most journalism relies on dubious Pakistani reports that exaggerate
innocent civilian casualties and discount terrorist fatalities. There
are few efforts to independently verify “first-hand accounts,” which are
always assumed to be true.

How were they supposed to do that when the CIA is secretive?! And how are they supposed to conduct independent verifications, in a place where the Taliban shoots 14-year-old girls and suicide bombers kill kids? Look, I have a better idea rather than sending NGO investigators into harm's way: let the CIA be willing to take compensation claims and they can research their bona fides. After all, the US military pays compensation for their "collateral damage". Why can't the CIA in the drones program?

Fair claims that drones are needed because there are no police, just a lot of militias and fighters, and that to have ground operations would risk more troops. OK, but one also has to examine whether repeated drone strikes that may be killing hundreds of innocent people could also start to really backfire in the "hearts and minds" department.

07/18/2012

AP and Fergana.news have reports this morning that the Taliban has blown up 22 trucks with ammunition and fuel for NATO forces that were bound for Afghanistan en route from Uzbekistan. No casualties were reported.

The incident occurred in Samangan, and the terrorists just used one bomb.

The truckers had spent the night at a gas station. There were also dozens of cars there where drivers were sleeping as well, and the Taliban exploited the situation, placing a magnet mine on one of the fuel trucks, which rapidly touched off a conflagration with the others. Panic ensued and it was hard to get the fire out.

It's hard to imagine no one was hurt in this situation.

I was just hearing a Russian Central Asian expert the other day say how poorly defended these authoritarian countries are, which he noticed again on a recent visit. When people discuss various scenarios for what may happen after 2014 when troops are withdrawn, they tend to talk about the Taliban "spilling over" into the Central Asian countries. Maybe they don't need to "spill," but the IMU may just go home or make a visit. A Mumbai-type scenario seemed more likely than conventional battles or sparking of civil wars, i.e. a series of smaller or even devastating urban terrorist attacks. And they don't have to wait until 2014 to start them.

I find that contrary to the fierce way they can appear, these countries can be quite brittle and fragile, because the corruption factor is always lurking around the corner -- when things are so strict, people constantly find ways to route around and it undermines authority -- and that means security.

Something told me they wouldn't be raising this issue like Laura Bush raised it in the Washington Post yesterday -- focusing on the Taliban's original threat and impending threat to women in Afghanistan. Of course, the former First Lady is utterly (and rightly) discredited in the eyes of HRW and other "progressives" because they see her associated with her husband's unjust war in Iraq, which in fact took resources away from the fight in Afghanistan.

I wondered how HRW would address the fundamental challenge of the Taliban, however, even if they were highlighting all last week NATO's victims in Libya -- singing along with the choir of Code Pink and RT. Of course, at the UN, we've seen Russia cry tears exclusively for NATO's victims in Libya, and not the victims they helped create in Syria and elsewhere.

If the Taliban threatens women's rights after NATO troops pull out in 2014, HRW piously intones, this will be "NATO's legacy". Not the fault of the Taliban and its guest Al Qaeda which NATO went in to fight in the first place, but NATO's fault:

“Many Afghans worry that NATO’s departure from Afghanistan will put basic rights under increasing threat,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Unless urgent steps are taken to address Afghanistan’s governance crisis, NATO’s legacy may be a country run by abusive warlords and unaccountable security forces.”

Abusive warlords who commit MOST of the killings and unaccountable security forces that seem to be supported by those warlords or Pakistan's ISI -- mentioned secondarily, after NATO.

So let's translate that into some frank talk: "NATO, you are pulling out of Afghanistan because your domestic populations can't stomach this war anymore with all the deaths of their own soldiers, some of them responsible for atrocities like the killing of Afghan villagers, and inability to defeat an insurgency on their own mountainous turf, so we're going to blame you if that insurgency overruns all the Western-funded programs to support development and human rights...because we can. Because you're near, and they are far."

And not surprisingly, in its statement, HRW is focusing on the corrupt and mismanaged government of Hamid Karzai, and calling for monitoring not of the Taliban's crimes against humanity -- the many suicide bombings, militant attacks on civilians, throwing of acid on girls in schools -- you know, all those really monstrous atrocities -- but is calling for monitoring of the Afgan National Army, which of course is likely to be corrupt and abusive, as all things run by corrupt and abusive client states of the US are corrupt and abusive. But it's like the old days in Latin America, when the left steadfastly refused to see or condemn the violent communist guerillas threatening the right-wing dictators and helping to enable their abuses while committing their own human rights violations.

In the old days, Americas Watch, as the Latin American program of Human Rights Watch was called them, would carefully produce such reports as Violations of the Laws of War by Both Sides of the Conflict in El Salvador -- or Nicaragua or Guatamala. That kind of balanced perspective has long since been overthrown at HRW as it has migrated to the "progressive" left in the last decade, however.

If they were to produce a report they were featuring today that had "violations of the laws of war by both sides of the conflict" for Afghanistan, it would show a scale utterly weighted down on one side by the Taliban and the Haqanni network as they commit 85 percent of the killings of civilians in the war -- i.e. it's like a kind of civil war underway that NATO only occasionally weighs in on, and tries to prop up one side which is corrupt but nominally secular and developing.

Again, I totally realize why HRW groups get into these pretzel-twists. They start with a viewpoint that international humanitarian law is something by which mainly states are bound, not non-state actors as such. That is, yes, non-state actors are increasingly found guilty one by one of such abuses at the International Criminal Court ("violation" is the term for when states don't break international law; "abuse" is the term when non-state actors don't follow its principles.)

But the center of gravity of the international justice jet-set is to look at states, not non-state actors, because they sign human rights treaties, terrorists don't, and they can get at them easily and effortlessly through the free Western media. The very notion of terrorism is a "destruction" of human rights, say some HRW divisions in their occasional and short statements on the subject. No need to keep stating the obvious -- terrorists are bad -- because what media will ever cover you then? Better to focus on liberal Western states that might not be fighting terrorism "the right way".

That center of gravity always tilts them to hate America first and hate NATO first in a situation like Afghanistan, even with the overwhelming awful atrocities of the enemies of NATO -- and all of us.

Increasingly over the years I've come to a depressing realization about these thinkers and doers in the international human rights movement -- it was never really about international human rights for them; human rights were always just a cover, a shield, a way-station, on their way to full-blown leftist and even Marxist radical agendas. That accounts for the awfulness of Amnesty International today, that has totally left behind its roots in concern for "prisoners of conscience" which were overwhelmingly produced by the communist countries. That accounts for how HRW has lost its way, to the point where Ken Roth now calls for pre-emptive credits of faith for "democratically-elected" Islamist governments.

The blood just doesn't get flowing with the same vigour for HRW when it comes to condemning all kinds of murderous non-state actors because they can simply be more successful in getting liberal media coverage and reactions from Western governments than they can of some deadly, entrenched medieval movement like the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Imagine a world if these groups and their mainstream media friends could use their incredible power to name and shame the Taliban, which is newly-PR conscious. Oh, but that would be simplistic and even wrong, like the Kony viral video, hmmm? That might *shudder* put them in the same place as the Christian right, eh?

So they don't even try.

I wish Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty would cover the NATO protests with a little more thought and depth than merely cutting and pasting the various idiotic one-sided anti-NATO slogans from lefty groups like The World Can't Wait. RFE/RL prides itself on being a news outlet and not a propaganda outlet, as does Voice of America, but increasingly one sees especially the younger correspondents of these US-funded stations simply replicating the hard-left Zeitgeist and not framing the issue with a larger advocacy even of the more centrist Obama Administration. I suppose as a politician influenced by his old and current DSA ties, even though this aspect of his biography has been studious scrubbed, Obama personally believes that all US wars are evil, capitalist, imperialist and racist inherently by nature and should just be closed down and war funds converted to human needs. Obviously he has had to temper his youthful "progressivism" now that his "community-organizing" has a national stage. My hope is that he would be tempered by reality when I voted for him.

Yes, some of what the US does is "wrong and immoral," in the words of anti-NATO protesters quoted by RFE/RL, and we should do better, because the world expects us to be better and we are held to a higher standard. And yes, the drones program has involved killing of innocent civilians who haven't been compensated because this program is run under the CIA, which keeps it secret and won't talk to the victims' lawyers. So that needs to change.

Meanwhile, the antiwar movement is as one-sided as it was in the 1960s and 1980s, focusing myopically only on US and Western crimes. As I noted, the Taliban kills the overwhelming majority of the civilians in Afghanistan. What's the left's plan when NATO leaves and the Taliban overruns Kabul and destroys secularism again?

I'm not suggesting we should stay, but I want to hear the left's plan for opposing terrorism in a world where Russia thwarts our efforts and dominates countries in Central Asia that are poor and vulnerable to spillover from the war in Afghanistan. I want a different world, too, where people don't mindlessly blame the US in wishing that "people aren't slaughtered in Afghanistan and Iraq and around the world just to make banks and just to make corporations rich." That's patently ridiculous. We've only impoverished our own country with these wars and they don't enrich banks in the simplistic manner in which the shriekers claim -- the terrorists and their supporters in Iran and other authoritarian regimes are the source of the problem. Again, what indeed is the left's plan for addressing this menace? What situation just like Vietnam and Cambodia are we waiting to see replicated in Central Asia and unfold around Afghanistan after our defeated troops leave?